The Lawyer as a Hired Gun

ByMonroe H. Freedman

It is a singularly good thing, I think, that law students, and even some lawyers and law professors, are questioning with increasing frequency and intensity whether “professionalism” is incompatible with human decency—asking, that is, whether one can be a good lawyer and a good person at the same time. I have special interest in that question because at least one perceptive critic, Professor John T. Noonan, Jr., has drawn the inference from my book on lawyers’ ethics
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that I do not believe that a decent, honest person can practice criminal law or teach others to do so.
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